In order to understand the laws, social habits, and customs in regard to the use of liquor it seems proper to consider briefly the sources of the population of the different states and of the country generally. At the time when America was settled, no European people drank water as we do today for a constant beverage. The English drank ale, the Dutch beer, the French and Spanish light wines, for every day use. Hence it seemed to the colonists a dangerous experiment to drink water in the New World. The Dutch were great beer drinkers and quickly established breweries at Albany and New York. Before the century ended New Englanders had abandoned the constant drinking of ale and beer for cider. Cider was very cheap; but a few shillings a barrel. It was supplied in large amounts to students at college and even very little children drank it. President John Adams was an early and earnest wisher for temperance reform; but, to the end of his life, he drank a large tankard of hard cider every morning when he first got up. It was free in every farmhouse to all travelers and tramps. As years passed on and great wealth came to individuals the tables of the opulent Dutch rivalled the luxury of English and French houses of wealth. When Doctor Cutler dined with Colonel Duer in New York in 1787 there were fifteen kinds of wine served, besides beer, cider, and porter. In the Dutch cellar might be found apples, parsnips, turnips, etc., along with barrels of vinegar, cider, and ale, and canty brown jugs of rum. In the houses of the wealthier classes there was also plenty of wine, either of the claret family or some kind of sack, which was a name covering sherries, canaries, and madeiras. Teetotalism would have been quite unintelligible to the farmer or burgher of those healthy days of breezy activity out of doors. In the Dutch cupboard or on the sideboard always stood the gleaming decanter of cut-glass or the square high-shouldered magnum of aromatic schnapps. The drinking habits of the Dutch colonists were excessive. Tempered in their tastes somewhat by the universal brewing and drinking of beer, they did not use as much as the Puritans of New England, nor drink as deeply as the Virginia planters, but the use of liquor was universal. A libation was poured on every transaction at every happening of the community; in public as well as private life John Barleycorn was a witness at the drawing of a contract, the signing of a deed, the selling of a farm, the purchase of goods, the arbitration of a suit. If a party backed out from a contract he did not back out from the treat. Liquor was served at vendues and made the bidders expansive. It appeared at weddings, funerals, church openings, deacon ordainings, and house raisings. No farm hand in haying, no sailor on a vessel, no workman in a mill, no cobbler, tailor, carpenter, mason, or tinker would work without some strong drink or treat. The bill for liquor where many workmen were employed at a house raising was often a heavy one.

As to New England, Eugene Lawrence in his papers on colonial progress, says, "wines and liquors were freely consumed by our ancestors and even New England had as yet (1775) no high repute for temperance. Rum was taken as a common restorative." The Puritans had no objection to wine, and in latter colonial times hard drinking was very common even among ministers; but they were much opposed to health drinking which was too jovial and pleasant to suit their gloomy principles. Doctor Peters thus speaks of Connecticut:

"The various fruits are in greater perfection than in England. The peach and apple are more luscious, beautiful, and large; one thousand peaches are produced from one tree; five or six barrels of cider from one apple tree. Cider is the common drink at the table. The inhabitants have a method of purifying cider by frost and separating the watery part from the spirit, which, being secured in proper vessels and colored by Indian corn, becomes, in three months so much like Madeira wine, that Europeans drink it without perceiving the difference. They make peachy and perry, grape and currant wines, and good beers of pumpkin, molasses, bran of wheat, spruce, and malt."

Perry was made from pears, as cider is from apples, and peachy from peaches. Metheglin and mead, drinks of the old Druids in England, were made from honey, yeast, and water. In Virginia whole plantations of the honey locust furnished locust beans for making metheglin. From persimmons, elderberries, juniper berries, pumpkins, cornstalks, hickory nuts, sassafras bark, birch bark, and many other leaves and roots various light wines were made. An old song boasted:

Beer was brewed in families, and the orchards soon yielded an abundance of cider. In 1721 the production of cider increased so that one village of forty families made three thousand barrels, and in 1728 Judge Joseph Wilder, of Lancaster, made six hundred and sixteen barrels himself.

When the Quakers framed their constitution for Pennsylvania they inserted clauses punishing swearing, intemperance, cardplaying, and the drinking of healths. They were mighty drinkers in their sober fashion, consuming vast quantities of ale and spirits, and making no serious inroads on the pure and wholesome water, although we are gravely assured that particular pumps, one on Walnut Street, and one in Norris Alley, were held in especial favor as having the best water in town for the legitimate purpose of boiling greens. Their first beer was made from molasses, and we have Penn's assurance that, when "well boyled with Sassafras or Pine infused into it," this was a very tolerable drink. Rum punch was also in liberal demand, and after a few years the thirsty colonists began to brew ale, and drank it out of deep pewter mugs.

When Congress met in 1774, in Philadelphia, John Adams was shocked by the display of eatables. His appetite overcame his scruples, although after each feast he scourged himself for yielding. After dining with Mr. Miers, a young Quaker lawyer, Adams remarks in his diary:

"A mighty feast again; nothing less than the very best of Claret, Madeira, and Burgundy. I drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience. This plain Friend and his plain though pretty wife, with her Thees and Thous, had provided us the most costly entertainment, ducks, hams, chickens, beef, pig, tarts, creams, custards, jellies, fools, trifles, floating islands, beer, porter, punch, wine, etc."

Again after dining at Mr. Powell's:

"A most sinful feast again: Everything which could delight the eye, or allure the taste, curds, and creams, jellies, sweetmeats of various kinds, twenty sorts of tarts, fools, trifles, floating islands, whipped syllabubs, etc. Parmesan cheese, punch, wine, porter, beer, etc."

The Swedes planted peach and fruit trees of all kinds, had flourishing gardens, and grew rich selling the products when the Quakers arrived. They made wine, beer, or brandy out of sassafras, persimmons, corn, and apparently anything that could be made to ferment and they imported Madeira. Acrelius, their historian, gives a long list of their drinks, and tells us that they always indulged in four meals a day.

In the True and Sincere Declaration, issued in December, 1609, by the Governor and Council for Virginia, there was an advertisement for two brewers, who, as soon as they were secured, were to be dispatched to the Colony. Brewers were also included among the tradesmen who were designed by the Company to go over with Sir Thomas Gates. This indicated the importance in the eyes of that corporation of establishing the means in Virginia of manufacturing malt liquors on the spot instead of relying on the importation from England. The notion arose that one of the principal causes of mortality so prevalent among those arriving in the Colony, in the period following the first settlement of the country, was the substitution of water for beer to which the immigrants had been accustomed in England. The Assembly, in the session of 1623, went so far as to recommend that all new comers should bring in a supply of malt to be used in brewing liquor, thus making it unnecessary to drink the water of Virginia until the body had become hardened to the climate. Previous to 1625, two brew-houses were in operation in the Colony, and the patronage they received was evidently very liberal.

Cider was in as common use as beer; in season it was found in the house of every planter in the Colony. It was the form of consideration in which rent was occasionally settled; the instance of Alexander Moore, of New York, shows the quantity often bequeathed: he left at his decease twenty gallons of raw cider and one hundred and thirty of boiled. Richard Moore of the same county kept on hand as many as fourteen cider casks. Richard Bennett made about twenty butts of cider annually, while Richard Kinsman compressed from the pears growing in his orchard forty or fifty of perry. A supply of spirits was provided for the members of public bodies when they convened. The character of the liquors used depended on the nature of the assemblage. When Charles Hansford and David Condon, as executors of the widow of the unfortunate Thomas Hansford, leased her residence in York to the justice of the peace of that county to serve as a court house, they bound themselves to furnish not only accommodations for horses, but also a gallon of brandy during each session of the bench. It is not stated whether this brandy was consumed by the honorable justices in the form of the drink which had become so famous in later times in Virginia, the mint julep, but if mint was cultivated in the colony at that age, it is quite probable that a large part of this gallon was converted into that mixture. In 1666 the justices of Lower Norfolk county rented the tract of land on which the court house was situated, on condition that the lessee, in part consideration for the use of the houses and orchards each year, would pay ten gallons brewed from English grain. The members of the Council appear to have been fastidious in their tastes. It was one of the duties of the auditor-general to have a large quantity of wine always ready at hand for this body. Thus on one occasion William Byrd, who filled the office in the latter part of the century, ordered for their use twenty dozen of claret, and six dozen of canary, sherry, and Rhenish, respectively. A quarter of a cask of brandy was also to be added.